top of page

Flash Fiction: 'At Last'

At Last

Three years later, this is how it ended. Conspiracy. Betrayal. Bitter lashes, lacerated skin. A lonely walk towards an ugly hill.

A road that stopped at the cross.

Darkness was growing, invisible to human eyes but thick like oil to celestial senses. A living, twisted manifestation of evil, it curled and writhed in the spaces between the masses of people, inflaming, pulsing; subverting reason and compassion. Rendering the degenerate heart of Men into a furnace.

Kill him!

Put him on the cross!

Destroy him who claims to be the Son of God!

Hands shoved and tore at the man at the centre of it all. Rocks fell to his left and to his right. Thorns from a mocking crown dug into his flesh. Dripping blood burned his eyes and seeped into his mouth.

Tell us the truth! Are you the Son of God?

Why won’t you speak?

Save yourself…

Like you promised to save us all!

A hand lifted a hammer, then drove spikes into the man’s hands and feet. Then he was lifted up for the world to see. To mock. To spit on. To ridicule.

"This was your plan? Sending a weak man of flesh to redeem these pathetic creatures?" The Viper’s ecstatic voice reached all the way from earth to the heavens. His laughter thrilled the stars. "You’ve lost! And now, they are mine!"

God the Father watched it all: the seething darkness; the madness driving the beings who had once been His friends and the epitome of creation, now more depraved than the lowest animal; the Viper’s glee reverberating up from the earth shaking the heavenly realm to its foundations.

The power to destroy surged in His hand. With a flick of a finger, He could eviscerate that Viper and erase humanity. He could start over with new humans and finally have the communal relationship with them that He had intended with Adam and Eve.

But the other hand also burned. Not with the intent to destroy but with the power of covenant love, the binding strength of a promise to save…

“Father, I will go. I will save them, though they do not deserve it.”

Now, He watched His Son bleed, suffer, and slowly suffocate while the ones He had gone to save shouted not blessings but curses upon His head.

They’d gambled for his clothes.

Had made Him carry His own cross.

And they’d nailed him to a tree.

“Father! Why have You forsaken me?” Desperation and loneliness shot up to heaven in that cry torn from bruised lips.

The Father’s heart broke.

Then, finally.

“It is done,” said the Spirit of God. “Now, it is my turn.” A moment later, He vanished from sight.

God the Father watched with hope swelling as the Spirit of God descend to the earth, a silver ball of light glowing amidst the darkness. He then sat on his throne to wait for His Son’s glorified return.

A Life had been extinguished. But it’s end had begun humanity’s eternity.

(story) Copyright @2018 by Dyane Forde (Delia Talent)

bottom of page